


Scratch, Kick, Let Gravity Win

by orphan_account



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Diego and Vanya are the Only People Who Give a Shit About Klaus, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Episode: s01e06 The Day That Wasn't, Flashbacks, Hallucinations, Heavy Angst, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Past Drug Use, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Diego Hargreeves, Psychosis, Umbrella Academy - Freeform, War, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-06 22:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17948039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Klaus just wants to stay with Dave, but time keeps dragging him somewhere else- the future, with his family, or the mausoleum. And the drugs aren't helping anymore.AU where they stop the apocalypse but things still go south for everyone's favorite disaster





	1. keep about your wits

Klaus doesn’t know where he is, most of the time. He’ll be walking down the street with Diego, he thinks, and suddenly Diego is gone and it’s grass and dust and smoke and people are yelling at him to run, so he does, he’ll run for his life until he slams into a mausoleum wall and then he’ll turn around and Diego is running down the sidewalk towards him, out of breath. A few hours later it’ll happen again. He’s doubled his dosage on everything and it doesn’t seem to be helping.  
So, he goes along with it. Wherever he is, that’s where he is. He’ll sit on the kitchen table while Vanya makes dinner, and as soon as the bombs go off he’ll duck for cover. At night, he’ll sit outside camp with Dave, and that’s when he feels okay, so that’s when he wants it to be real. That’s what he tells himself is real. But he’ll start falling asleep and when he forces his eyes open Luther is laying him in the backseat.  
“You’ve got to stop running away,” Luther says.  
“What… time is it?” Klaus doesn’t care, that’s the least of his problems. But he can’t ask why he can’t stay in one place without admitting that he’s been moving around. Worse, he would have to tell Luther that he’s probably really in Vietnam, asleep or spaced out, and soon enough someone’s going to come over and grab his shoulder and hand him a flask so he doesn’t have to pretend he’s in a car anymore.  
“I don’t know, two pm, maybe? Why, were you supposed to meet a dealer?”  
“I don’t do drugs, they’re bad for you.” He lets his head fall back against the car door, and waits for it to change again.  
The thing he hates the most, the drugs don’t stop the ghosts anymore. When he’s in Vietnam they’re everywhere, standing where they died, holding photos and waiting for orders. Sometimes, one of them sees him seeing them and asks him to take a message home. He knows he can’t, but he remembers them anyway.  
“Eddie Jamison, she goes to Brown, can you tell her Joe hopes she doesn’t ever get better at math? ‘Cuz I’m… you know… but I still wanna help her.”  
“My mom lives on 5th and 19th. First floor. Tell her I got her letter, I just never got to write the reply.”  
“270-999-8467. Call it and tell whoever answers that I kept the fucking recipes for Thanksgiving under the box on the top shelf of my closet. But don’t say fucking. They hate that shit.”  
“What the hell is he saying?”  
“I don’t know, he was doing it the whole drive home. Names and addresses, mostly.”  
When he’s at the academy, Ben isn’t there as often as he should be. But all the other ghosts are. The ones he tried to ignore when he was growing up. They’re louder now, probably mad that he started blocking them out when he was thirteen. One of them looks like a maid, and she’s always by the fireplace. He waves at her as Luther carries him into the house, and she glares and turns towards the wall. Even the dead people in his house are mad at him. Maybe because they think he keeps running away, too. Klaus wonders if she knows where Ben is, if he’s in his room or if he went somewhere else or if his ghost died, too, and now Klaus really has to deal with all the shit the rest of his family deals with. And he wonders where his dad is, because the bastard never shows up unless it’s to open the mausoleum door and tell him one more day, one more hour, actually, what the hell, we’re just gonna leave you in there.  
Someone’s sitting in front of him, it’s Five, he can tell from the uniform even though everything’s blurry. It’s hard for him to hear anything, over the yelling of the dead Swedish guy in the kitchen, but he sees Five shake his head before he leaves the tiny field of vision Klaus is allowed to have right now.  
In Vietnam there’s dried blood under his fingers, and it’s here now, too, but there’s also a lattice of red lines on the backs of his hands and everywhere else on his arms so he can’t really use it to figure out where he really is, or if he’s really switching all the time. He starts to rummage in his pockets for a dime bag or a lighter, but he’s not wearing his jacket. Someone puts a blanket over his shoulders, to make up for it, but it’s dusty. Of course it’s fucking dusty, everything is, here. He leans back against the wall of the ambulance and listens to the gunshots go off, further and further away. They make a sharp left, and Klaus feels the shrapnel in his leg. He doesn’t remember getting hit.  
There’s a ghost sitting across from him, dried blood under one of his eyes. They’ve got the same blanket wrapped around both their shoulders.  
“Good morning,” Klaus says, surprised to find that there’s blood in his mouth.  
The ghost waves.  
“I guess a bomb went off. I mean, that’s not very specific. But…” he looks down. The sheets under his leg are red. “Sure hope I don’t end up like you. No offense.”  
“If you don’t, can you… sorry, can you take a message?”  
“I’ll add it to my list. Lucky number seventeen.”  
“Three more hours.”  
“What?”  
The bed turns into stone floor underneath him. Klaus barely has time to pull his knees to his chest and put his hands over his ears before it starts. The screaming. It’s always his name, he doesn’t even know how they learned it. Maybe his dad told them, to prove a point, but he doesn’t know what point; or maybe he’s been saying it to himself this whole time, as a reminder, because he keeps forgetting where he starts and the dark stops. Now he doesn’t need to say it to himself, because the ghosts are doing it for him. Now he doesn’t need to say anything. Even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to hear himself.  
Sometimes he can make out some of their words.  
“We can’t take him to the hospital if we can’t get him to the car.”  
“What are we supposed to do, Diego, fucking tranquilize him?”  
“He wouldn’t object to it.”  
But after a few seconds they fade back into the wall of cold and sand that keeps being built on top of him, brick by slow brick. If he could open his eyes, he’d look for Ben, even though he knows it’s just him in here. Ben’s back at home, probably in the midst of another experiment. At least the shit his dad is putting his siblings through at home has a purpose. No one’s collecting data on Klaus stuck in the dark. There’s not gonna be any kind of conclusion. There wasn’t any kind of hypothesis.  
He starts to move further into the mausoleum corner and it’s the backseat of a car. He can tell without opening his eyes. Time is a hurricane that moves too fast and tears his house apart and takes his jacket, and he liked it better when he could find its eye at the bottom of a shot glass. But he doesn’t get that luxury anymore. Now it just picks him up and takes him wherever it feels like he should be. He doesn’t finish conversations, so he tries not to start them. He’s given up on finding his bearings.  
When he opens his eyes, Ben is sitting in the seat next to him. For once, things aren’t blurry. Which makes him almost think that this is where things are real, here, where his siblings keep putting him in backseats. But this isn’t where Dave is, so he brushes the thought away. Diego is driving and Five is in the passenger seat, doing a bad job at hiding his annoyance at the fact he’s not driving. Klaus gets close to asking where they’re going, but he decides against it before the question reaches the tip of his tongue. They probably already told him, and he’s worried there might still be blood in his mouth.  
“You’re fucked,” Ben says; he doesn’t turn away from the window. “They’re taking you to the hospital.”  
Klaus swallows hard. “Because of the shrapnel?”  
“What did you say?” Diego adjusts the rearview mirror.  
“In my leg. Before the fucking mausoleum.”  
“Five, he’s not making any sense.”  
“He’s having a psychotic episode. Can you blame him?” Five turns around in his seat, with a concerned-parent look that Klaus only knows from movies. Dave worked in a movie theater before he got drafted, as an usher. He could recite almost the entirety of the Graduate. Whenever it was too loud, or whenever either of them were thinking too much, he’d lean over and quote it to Klaus. The last thing he ever heard him say was “oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think you’re the most attractive of all my parents’ friends. I mean that.” He doesn’t have any way to watch it, now, and even if he could he wouldn’t get through the opening credits before he went somewhere else or passed out. Dave taps him on the shoulder and tells him he can’t fall asleep yet, he’s gotta stay awake and listen, it’s the first time it’s been quiet in four months, Hargreeves, you’re really gonna fall asleep on me and miss out on the quiet? No helicopters or anything.  
“Calm before the storm,” Klaus whispers. He’s tired, he’s the kind of tired he used to get halfway through rehab, but he wants to listen. Back at home he couldn’t stand silence, as soon as someone stopped talking he put his headphones on, but now things were different. “You’re gonna have to keep my eyes open for me.”  
Dave’s hands go on top of his hands, perfect fit, the way he leans his head back against Dave’s chest, perfect fit. They’re going to die, but things are okay. He doesn’t remember what happened during the day, but he’s here now, and after four months he’s pretty sure forgetting isn’t a bad thing. Whoever died today, at least their peace and quiet was going to last a little longer.  
“I think you’re the only person I’ve ever cared about knowing,” Klaus says quietly. It’s the first time he’s ever said something like that and it’s been true, instead of a cheap way to get someone to take him back to their apartment so he can raid their medicine cabinet after they fell asleep. He knows that Dave doesn’t even like the Graduate, he’s just seen it so many times and most of the things he says he picked up from things he’s seen a lot. Klaus knows he got suspended in tenth grade for selling weed because he was saving up for college. He was gonna be an English major, and he almost was, but then his dad had a heart attack and he took two months off of school to take care of things, and that’s when they got him. Somehow that’s the most important information Klaus has in his brain. The two of them planned it all out, shouting in each other’s ears in the middle of a battle. They were going to move to a big city that neither of them had ever been to, find an apartment neither of them could afford, and be the kind of happy neither of them had ever gotten to be before.  
He can feel Dave looking at the top of his head. “Klaus?”  
“Hmm.”  
“I need you to listen to me.”  
“I always listen to you-”  
“Klaus, you need to go back. I love you, but you need to go.”  
“Back… to the future?” Klaus laughs. “You’ll get that in a few years.”  
Dave moves so that Klaus is forced to sit up by himself. “You have to know this isn’t real. I don’t know how you got me here, considering… everything, but we’re not in Vietnam. And I don’t think I can stay.”  
“I don’t understand.”  
“You’re in the hospital.”  
Klaus laughs again.  
“In the future.”  
“Yeah, okay.”  
“You overdosed, I think. Everyone’s acting like you’re dying.”  
“That sounds like me, but-”  
“You conjured me, I don’t even know how, since you’re so out of it, and you’ve been talking like we’re there this whole time, I didn’t wanna ruin it, but… you’ve got to go back. I think you might be dying, or something.”  
Gunshots start up in the distance, quick and strangely rhythmic. Klaus puts his fingers on his wrist- they’re firing in time with his heartbeat. Not good. The grass feels like it’s grown over a mattress when he turns around to look at Dave. He used to be good at math, when he was younger. Almost as good as Five, although Dad made sure he knew he wasn’t as close of a second as it seemed like he was. After he was thirteen, he mostly used that fact to calculate exactly how much OxyCodone he could take without Ben having to find him dead in the bathroom the next morning, and then when he was the one who found Ben dead he stopped caring about numbers at all. Now he wished he’d stuck with it, he wished he was Five and could write an equation on his bedroom wall that would tell him where he was, what to do. Things are falling apart. They have been for a long time. And he knows that if he just holds on, finds a wall to slam his head against next time things start to change, he knows that if he picks a place and stays there it’ll be okay. And this is the place he wants to stay.  
“Look at the sky. Does it look like that anywhere else? It’s real. We’re here,” Klaus almost yells, craning his head back, pointing straight up.  
“It’s the ceiling, Hargreeves.”  
“No. No it’s not. It’s not.”  
“Klaus, please-”  
“Fuck you! Everything keeps-” a bomb goes off “-everything keeps changing, I’m gonna be somewhere else in two minutes, anyway, and I just want to stay here. You’re real.”  
“I’m dead.”  
“Fuck you.” Another bomb goes off. Klaus struggles to his feet- it takes more effort than he was expecting- and starts running through the jungle, feeling the leaves hit his face, feeling the grass on his ankles, feeling his hair stick to his neck with humidity. It’s real. The place he’s in right now is real.  
He gets maybe a hundred yards before a breeze starts blowing, cold. At first he thinks it’s just the Vietnam weather finally deciding to do something nice, but it smells like stone and it sounds like dead leaves. He stops dead and looks for something to hold on to, anything, he can’t leave now, after everything he just said to Dave, after all that work convincing himself he knows where he is. There’s nothing to grab, so he digs blood-encrusted nails into forearms. He feels old scabs reopen, but the walls start forcing their way through the jungle anyway.  
“Stop,” Klaus shouts, like it’s going to do any good. “Shit, please, stop.” He fumbles for his pockets, since it’s getting darker, but he’s not wearing his jacket. It doesn’t even feel like he’s wearing his academy uniform. He doesn’t know what he’s wearing.  
None of them knew how to talk when they were kids. Sure, there was Diego, but Luther only ever repeated what Dad told him to. Really, that’s what he still does. And Allison only spoke when she was spreading rumors. Vanya didn’t talk much, probably because no one would give her the chance, and Five talked too much: so much that Ben would have to put his hand over his mouth if anyone wanted to get a word in edgewise. Ben had his own kind of language. It was mostly hand signals. He still remembers them all, which is nice when Klaus doesn’t want to seem too crazy. Gestures that can be played off as fidgeting are better than a one-sided conversation on a crowded bus. Klaus would start a sentence and never find his way to the end of it. He would think of something else, or, more often, there would be a ghost who was talking louder and saying more interesting things than him. He couldn’t control it when he was younger. He still can’t, really, but back then it wasn’t his fault.  
Ghosts are fucking scary. Even Ben, sometimes. They always know so much more than Klaus, and they always have so much unfinished business. When he was younger, he was terrified. He’d cry every time his dad broke out the ouija board. He’d go on missions with earplugs in so that there wasn’t a possibility of any of the dead trying to talk to him. When he was eleven he’d set his room on fire to try and get rid of the people he kept bringing in by accident. He did it again when he was thirteen, and that’s when old man Hargreeves had really had enough.  
And that’s where Klaus is now. With his hands clamped over his ears and his eyes screwed shut. Doing his best not to think about the stacks of corpses around him, hidden by a thin layer of rock, and the souls that used to live in them, running at him like they were going to vault over him and not just pass through. He thinks they’re doing it just to torture him, because they’re probably bored, and who doesn’t want to fuck with him? He can’t even finish a sentence. It’s cold, and it only gets colder every time somebody sprints in and out of him. Dad wants him to try and keep them there. Channeling. Klaus thinks he’d end up setting himself on fire- he’s about to anyway, just to keep himself warm.  
He wants to sleep. But he has to find his way back to Vietnam to do that, because there’s no way he’s sleeping here, and there’s no way he’ll sleep at home, when there’s two joints and a dime bag of pills hidden under the passenger seat of the family car. They’re old, but they’ll work. Before he can start thinking of a plan, though, one of the ghosts grabs his shoulders. Like it’s solid. Like now it can do anything it wants. Klaus screams and scrambles to his feet. The ghost tightens its grip. Not good. He twists and pushes until he can’t feel the hands anymore. When he opens his eyes- he has to, to run- fluorescent lights flicker above him. Like lightning. Like flashlight beams under bridges. Three more pairs of hands are on his arms and shoulders and torso, that’s three more ghosts who are more solid than he is, so he screams more, and then the hurricane wins. He closes his eyes again and lets it take him in circles.


	2. could never hope to keep them

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to say things last chapter so uh  
> 1- the AU is that they stayed in the Day That Wasn't timeline and since that's the one where they're all mostly rational human beings (and don't lock their sister in the basement hhhhhh) the apocalypse doesn't happen  
> 2- the title and all the chapter titles are from the song "It's Called: Freefall" by Rainbow Kitten Surprise which has Big Hargreeves Vibes   
> hell yeah

There’s an IV bag pumping all the fluids he forgot to give himself into his bloodstream. Ben is sitting on the edge of his bed. The heart monitor is beeping in a way that sounds erratic even to him, and he overdoses once a week at least; he’s heard his heart do everything it’s not supposed to. Diego sits in a chair next to him, his face in his hands.  
“You look like you need a drink,” Klaus says. His voice is hoarser than he thinks it should be.  
“Klaus, shit, you’re awake.” Diego sits up and wipes his sleeve across his eyes. “They said it would be another hour or something. They had to sedate you.”  
“Why?”  
“You… well, first of all, you ran out of the emergency room. Like you jumped off the gurney and ran out the doors. And then you punched Allison in the face. A bunch of nurses tried to get you back inside, but I guess you know how to fight even when you’re three seconds away from collapsing. So, sedated. Knocked out. It’s probably for the best, though. When was the last time you slept?”  
“That’s the Reginald Hargreeves guarantee,” Ben says.  
“In my defense, I thought they were ghosts.”  
Diego clenches his jaw. “That ain’t helping your case. When was the last time you slept?”  
“Oh, well, let me see.” He remembers sleeping on Dave’s shoulder, recently, but that was only two hours or so, and he’s stopped keeping track of days since he started changing locations so much. To avoid jet lag. “Probably like, a few days ago.”  
“It’s Friday.”  
“Ooh. TGIF. You got plans?”  
“Yeah. I’m gonna wait here, and see if they’re gonna transfer you to the psych ward or not. When was the last time you ate something?”  
“I hate psych wards. Last time I was there the guy watching me shower said I was a bad singer.”  
“Klaus…” Diego runs a hand through his hair. “Please answer my question.”  
“When did Vanya make dinner?”  
“A week and a half ago. And you weren’t there. Luther went looking for you and found you in a park on the other side of town.”  
“Oh. Then I don’t know.” Klaus stares at the heart monitor, watches it go batshit. Dave might have been onto something, when he said he was dying.  
“Shit. Shit. Look, I know you’re not gonna listen to me, but you can’t take that many pills and drink that much and not eat and not sleep. The doctor said if we hadn’t brought you in you would’ve been dead in the next week. I thought you were gonna stay sober. You got clean, and we stopped the apocalypse, you know, and I just… what fucking happened?”  
Klaus shrugs. There’s no way to explain that he can’t tell if he’s thirty and home or twenty-nine and on the other side of the planet or thirteen and locked in a mausoleum. There aren’t enough words in his fogged-over, apparently-starved brain to explain how one day, two months ago, judging by the date on the computer monitor, he stopped being able to focus on anything, he’d forget where he was walking less than ten steps into walking there, and one day he started walking somewhere and instead of just losing the final destination he lost all the walls and ceilings in his house and he was standing in the middle of a battlefield.   
“Well, something happened. And you look like shit.”  
“You should see the other guy.” He laughs until it turns into coughing. “Where’s everyone else?”  
“In the cafeteria. I can go get them, if you want.”  
The room isn’t spinning as much as it usually does, when he wakes up. Probably because it’s not an ambulance, and usually he wakes up en route. He’s on at least three of the paramedics’ Christmas card list. “Happy holidays, Klaus, hope I never see you again :)” like they don’t know that he’s going to be their first stop on their Christmas eve shift. At least someone calls an ambulance. A stranger, or he does it himself just before he blacks out. Good old Reginald just watched him through the security cameras until it was almost too late, and then he sent Mom in.   
“No, they probably just want to go home.”  
“We were home all day yesterday. You’ve been here since Wednesday, bud.”  
“Oh, shit. You think they’ll put whatever they gave me in a to-go box?”  
Diego stands up. “Fuck you. You almost died, Klaus. I know that’s a typical evening for you, but it was bad this time. It still is. Don’t sit there and joke about that shit. I’m gonna go get the others. And the doctor. Fuck you.”  
The door slams behind him, the sound of heavy wood against heavier stone. Klaus peels the bandages off the back of his hand and scratches off the scabs. He’s on shaky ground, he knows it, things are about to change again. The floor under Diego’s chair is already covered in dead grass, and outside the window he sees the building across the street go up in a pillar of smoke and napalm. Dave had to have been lying, because there was no way he could’ve conjured him in the middle of the worst (possibly, second-worst) overdose of his life. If he had, he’d be here now, because there was nothing he wanted more than for Dave’s hands to be on top of his, perfect fit. But they weren’t, so there was no way he’d done it when he was too out of it to even care.  
“Earth to Four,” Ben says.  
Klaus flinches. The heart monitor spikes. “Don’t call me that, christ!”  
“Sorry. I’ve been trying to get your attention for the past five minutes.”  
“Shit, really? What was I doing?”  
“Scratching all the skin off your hand.”  
He probably should’ve kept the bandages on. When he looks down there’s blood on his sheets, it’s from his leg, the ambulance runs over a bump, probably a body, and he almost falls off the bed. No he doesn’t. No he doesn’t, he looks at Ben and he listens to the heart monitor freaking the fuck out. “Was Dave here? Earlier?”  
“Yeah. Only for a couple minutes, though. Maybe your brain has protocol so you don’t die alone, or something.”  
“That would be nice.”  
He’s opening his mouth to say something else when the door slams open. Ben grimaces. Their siblings file in, with varying degrees of concern on their faces. Vanya takes one look at the screen displaying his vitals and looks closer to passing out than he is. Allison and Five are giving him the same kind of vague indifference they give everyone. Luther stalks over until he’s looming over the bed, glaring.  
“What the hell were you thinking?” He doesn’t wait for a response, but he never does, so Klaus doesn’t even try to think of one. “Screwing yourself up is one thing, but dragging all of us into it, too? We’re all trying to get our lives together. I know you don’t know this, but we all have problems, too. Frankly, most of them are more important than yours, but you don’t see us ODing about it.”  
Vanya takes a step towards the bed. “Luther, he’s-”  
“No no no, let him finish,” Klaus waves her off. The yelling is keeping him in the hospital room.  
“You asshole. I thought when you came back, maybe you would’ve at least stopped doing all the crap you do for attention, but I guess nothing’s changed. Everyone stopped being proud of you for getting clean, and the second someone else gets any attention, you've got to put it back on yourself. That’s what this is really about. Sixteen years you’ve been doing this! Do you know how many missions you ruined?” He slams his hand on the bedframe, right next to Klaus’ face, and christ is that the wrong thing to do.  
A bullet whizzes past his ear and he drops to the ground, lying flat on his back. Nights are always the worst, because they’re supposed to be the break from fighting, when Klaus gets to sit by the fire with Dave and listen to his stories. His life is everything Klaus wishes he had- it’s a real, living life, and all the people he knows are real, living people, not ghosts or kids raised to be comic book characters. But the war doesn’t give a shit about him and Dave, so now he’s lying on the forest floor, waiting for the gunfire to stop. He left his helmet back at camp, and his hair is stuck to his forehead with sweat. He holds his breath and tries not to move. Eyes closed. Playing dead.  
Another soldier drops down beside him. Klaus doesn’t know who he is, but his blood is getting on Klaus’ shirt.  
“Do you know where you are?” the soldier asks.  
“Excuse me?”  
“Do you know where you are?”  
Klaus looks up at the brown clouds covering up the brown night through the almost-dead treetops. “Vietnam, dumbass.” A bomb goes off. He puts his hands over his ears. He’s been spending a lot of time in that position lately: lying on his back, trying not to hear things.  
In the distance, he hears someone shout. He can’t make out the words, but he knows it’s Dave. Suddenly the bullets flying just above his face don’t seem as dangerous as they used to. He pushes himself up to his elbows, looking for the direction he’s going to run, but a hand on his chest holds him back.  
“Klaus, you need to rest,” the other soldier says.  
“You sound like my sister,” he replies, because he does, he has the same voice as Vanya. Then he bolts.


	3. thought it was a necklace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> holy shit okay this is getting Big Support thank you for all your kind comments!!! this is kinda a transitional chapter, and mostly so that i could add in a few more flashbacks that i really wanted to write, but i promise more Things are coming. 
> 
> i would also like to say that you've heard of it's called: freefall as a Klaus theme song now get ready for pills by st vincent
> 
> tw for suicide

The next time Klaus is aware of anything around him, besides the sounds of guns and traffic and dry leaves twisting around until he can’t think straight, is when his ankles start to itch under the restraints. He wants to scratch, rip all the skin off like he did with the backs of his hands, but his wrists are tied down, too. So all that he can do is blink at the hospital ceiling and listen. Once the traffic-gunshots-ghosts fade out he can make out voices in the room. Vanya is talking the most. She’s been the liaison between the Umbrella Academy and the normal world since they were teenagers, checking Klaus into rehab for the first time and helping Diego with his resume. It makes sense that she’d be the one explaining everything. He wonders if she could use the sound from his heart monitor to break all the windows in the building. It’s evened out since he heard it last, but that’s probably just whatever they have running through his bloodstream. He wonders if she could rip out the IV for him. It would hurt, he knows, of course it would, it’s a needle going in and out of skin, and he’s got experience with that.  
They buy ink and a needle in town and give each other stick-and-pokes sitting on the front steps of the library. One of the other guys, Daniel, does them, he used to be a tattoo artist before he was a draft number. Dave needs someone to hold his hand the entire time, because he’s got the lowest pain tolerance Klaus has ever seen. They all get ones on their shoulders; so does everyone in their [division], eventually. And then, the sun sets, and they finish the bottle of whiskey the three of them were sharing, and Daniel gives each of them another one, above Klaus’ right knee and Dave’s left, tiny shot glasses because they couldn’t think of anything else and because the first time they kissed the one Klaus was holding fell and broke and they spent the next five minutes cleaning up the glass. There’s a scar on his thumb from it.  
That’s not where he is. That isn’t where he is. He’s looking at the hospital ceiling. Vanya has stopped talking to the doctor, and now she’s talking to Diego.  
“... It’s only for three weeks, and then he can come back to the Academy.”  
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea. It didn’t work last time.”  
“He was sixteen last time. And he wasn’t having hallucinations.”  
Klaus hears someone sit down. “So you think it’s a good idea for him to be locked up, probably surrounded by a bunch of ghosts, with basically unlimited access to meds-”  
“It’s not like they’re just sitting out in the open.”  
“You think he wouldn’t figure something out? He did last time. We’re a family, sort of. We should be able to get him through this.”  
“Diego. Our family is the reason he’s like this.”  
It’s time for Klaus to say something. He’s the family bomb squad, he always has been, and he has figuring out the exact moment to create a distraction big enough to avoid another fight down to a science. Whenever Luther and Diego were at odds over who was really in charge of a mission, Klaus would start singing as loud as he could. When he heard the start of a rumor in what had started as a simple argument, he would run in and ask if anyone wanted to get donuts. When Reginald was a little too disappointed in how training had gone, a little to angry at the lack of saving the world his kids were doing, he would pick a fight with Luther or throw himself down a staircase so the disappointment had to change into damage control and late-night drives to the emergency room. “Good morning,” he croaks, and pushes himself up onto his elbows. Or he starts to, because he forgot about the restraints, but he ends up just laying there. Playing dead, kind of.  
“Hey, you’re awake.” Vanya crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed. “Do you… know where you are?”  
“Best guess? Tibet.”  
“Shit.”  
“Oh my god, I’m kidding. I’m strapped to a hospital bed.”  
Diego doesn’t move from his spot in front of the window. “Sorry about the restraints, bro.”  
“Oh, I’m not complaining.”  
“Okay, he’s fine.” Vanya rolls her eyes and stands up again. “Listen, we were talking about… I mean…”  
“The doctor said you should spend a couple weeks in the psych ward.”  
“There’s a private facility a few miles away.”  
“Either way, you’re going on meds. The real way, not your way. And you’re moving back home.”  
“Or you can move in with me or Diego. Just, somewhere we can help before the paramedics have to.”  
Klaus just lies there and listens. For the first few weeks in Vietnam, there weren’t enough beds. Obviously a few opened up soon enough, but for a while, he could share with Dave without anyone thinking anything. Neither of them could sleep- Klaus said in the future they didn’t need it anymore, and Dave said he was giving it up for Lent- so instead they told each other every story they could think of. Dave whispered all the things that had happened to him in grade school and Klaus told him the plot of different episodes of Gossip Girl and both of them knew that the other was making shit up, substituting someone else’s name with theirs, and it was fine. He didn’t used to be able to sit still for long enough to listen to someone tell him a story, but something about the planes flying low overhead and the weight of Dave’s dog tags on his neck kept him awake and hanging onto every word he said until someone told them to run.  
The door slams open. That’s how he can tell it’s Luther. That’s how he’s always been able to tell it’s Luther, since the dawn of time. Sometimes a door will slam or something will crash and Klaus will have to stare at the person who did it for an uncomfortable amount of time to get it through is head that it wasn’t Luther, even when there’s no possible way it could have been.  
“Well?” he says. It’s not worth looking away from the ceiling for; he knows he’s standing in his Leader Pose. Even now, when they’re twenty-nine and haven’t worn their masks (well, except for Diego) in over a decade, it’s still hard to picture him out of uniform.  
“We were filling Klaus in.”  
“So you told him we’re taking him to Noble as soon as they discharge him?”  
“I mean, we said it’s an option-”  
“It’s the option. It’s what we’re doing.”  
“But it might not be the best-”  
“You’re really gonna pass up three weeks of not having to deal with him?”  
Klaus tries to sit up. “Hey, he’s awake, you know.”  
“Shut up.”  
The last time Klaus had been driven to Noble Psychiatric Hospital, he’d ridden in the passenger seat, and Ben had been alive in the back. There had been more trees on the sides of the roads than there are now, and the whole time he’d listened to Reginald ask him how could he do something so stupid, didn’t he care about his family, or the planet, or anything, did he know how big of a disgrace he was, did he know the only reason he didn’t get left in that mausoleum was because he was supposed to save the world, was he happy that he was getting out of two weeks of training, that now the whole Academy would be two weeks behind where they were supposed to be, was he happy he let everyone on the planet down, was he?  
The last time this car had strained up this driveway, there was still a raw, red line across his neck, because he’d done all the math right and he’d stolen Five’s tie because just his wasn’t long enough, but he hadn’t accounted for the fact that it would be the one morning that Mom would care that he was late for breakfast.  
This time, Diego is driving, and Ben is dead in the passenger seat. It occurs to him that Luther has a point. Diego is his emergency contact at all the hospitals in town, and at most of the rehab centers, and he can’t imagine what that’s like, having to deal with all your own shit leftover from the Umbrella Academy and have your fuck-up brother’s shit on top of it. The guy deserves three weeks of a Klaus Hargreeves-free existence, doesn’t he? Everyone does, at some point. That’s what Klaus was trying to get, when he was sixteen. That’s what Dad got, when he locked a thirteen-year-old in a room full of skeletons.  
They’re inside now. They have been for a while. Ben is standing next to him, because the office they’re in didn’t account for dead brothers when they were putting in the furniture. And Diego turns to him, with the same look on his face that he gets every time he picks him up from the hospital and asks what happened, even though he knows exactly what happened, he can always hear how scratchy Klaus’ voice is and he always knows it’s because he got his stomach pumped again.  
“I’ll come visit as soon as they let me.”  
“This place looks a lot nicer than you told me it was,” Ben says.  
Klaus sighs and signs whatever anyone tells him to. For once, there’s no possible way for him to run away. Everyone here is specially trained to stop him, and there’s only one exit, and Diego’s between him and it. Besides, he’s too tired to run. He’s so fucking tired.


	4. who you came in with

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> COCAIIINE (I’m sad) we BOTH like to do COCAIIIINE 
> 
> have another chapter where Nothing Good Happens

The ground Klaus stands on gets a little less shaky. It settles into the close-cut carpet of the hallways, but he still watches it, waiting for it to change again. Sometimes the walls of his room turn from beige drywall to gray stone, for a couple of seconds, or he’ll hear a bomb go off in the distance. But otherwise, it’s quieter. He hopes it’s not just because of the meds, because he knows he’s going off them as soon as they send him home. Either that, or he’ll take the whole bottle the second he starts feeling something other than dull.  
Ben is the only person he talks to, despite all of his attempts to get Klaus to talk to someone else. At least here, it’s not weird. That’s difference number one between public transportation and psych wards. Difference number two is that Klaus can’t go anywhere, even when every cell in his body is telling him walk out the doors as fast as he can and keep on walking until he collapses from exhaustion, maybe then he’ll get a full night’s sleep for the first time in his life. That’s not true. He got a couple nights with Dave, the only person he would ever even consider spending the entire night with, the way people are supposed to do. Usually he finds someone to hook up with just so he doesn’t have to sleep under a bridge again, and he goes through their medicine cabinet as soon as they fall asleep. Maybe he’ll go back to that, when they let him out. It’s not like he’s going to find anyone else whose hands fit on top of his, perfect fit.   
Most of the days he spends staring at the ceiling. He can tell where he is by the differences in them; the gray and white tiles in the cafeteria, the light fixtures in the different doctor’s offices, the smooth emptiness of his room. Everything is smooth and everything is empty, all the time. After the past two months, it takes some getting used to. Not just the walls: real life, too. Or, whatever he’s living in here. The check-ins and weigh-ins. The routines and rules. The same bed, every night, that he has to try and sleep on, every night. Temperature control. Questions. Questions about him and how he is and where he is. He can only remember one other time everything was this quiet and orderly, and it’s the last time he was here, when he was sixteen.   
It’s been two weeks. He’s got one more week to go, and after that he doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Heroin, probably. That’s what he says when Ben asks, when they’re sitting on his floor, only a little bit joking. It doesn’t go over well.  
“How dare you,” Ben says.  
“Whoa, hey, there’s plenty of other options. Like, uh, college, or…” he’s got a feeling behind his eyelids that hasn’t gone away since he woke up in the hospital “other drugs.”  
“You almost died! Not just this time. You’ve been almost-dying once a week since before I died. I don’t know how you’re not dead.”  
“Because God hates me.” Klaus leans back against the bedframe.  
“Fuck off.”  
“No, I met her! She’s like, four years old, or something.”  
“Promise me you’ll just… do the bare minimum. Take your meds. Don’t take anything else. Talk to living people. Or, talk to Diego. Eat like a human being. Or, eat once a day. Something. Because if you don’t… I don’t know. I can’t do anything. But I can’t keep sitting here watching you do shit like this. I’ve been watching you OD, and sneak pills in to rehab, fucking rehab, and not be able stop you, and it’s been sixteen years. Please don’t make me do this anymore.”  
“Do I look different without eyeliner?”  
“Do you know how many times you’ve passed out somewhere where no one can find you? I don’t, because I lost track. I lost fucking track of how many times I’ve had to try and get you some help, or call 911, and I couldn’t, because, you know, I’m dead. I can’t do that anymore. I’ll leave. And I won’t come back.”  
Klaus blinks a couple of times. “You didn’t answer my question.”  
“You look tired.” He stands up, like he’s going to leave or something. “You look like shit.”  
“Gee, thanks.”  
“Tell me you're not gonna find your dealer as soon as they let you out.”  
Klaus squeezes his eyes shut and, for once, hopes that when he opens them he’s somewhere else. Anywhere else but a blank beige room in a building full of people who keep asking him what’s wrong, where he can’t scratch the constant itch in his arms without someone telling him not to. He wants to be screaming, shooting something, doing anything but choosing between lying to Ben and losing him. He doesn’t know what he would do. Sure, he ignores every suggestion and warning and bargain Ben tries on him, but they do something. And sometimes they work. He thinks they might start working all the time, eventually. And he’s the only person who knows what to do. Ben takes one look at his face and knows what the nightmare he just woke up from was about. Ben talks him down from the roof of that office building downtown in less than ten words. Ben sings Queen at the top of his lungs when Luther’s talking so Klaus doesn’t have to listen.  
“Klaus. Hey. At least tell me you wont OD.”  
He knows he’s going to. It’s the kind of knowledge that sits at the bottom of his stomach and takes up more of his appetite than the drugs and withdrawals do. He knows that as soon as he can find a way around Diego he’s taking the cash he knows Allison left in the kitchen and spending it on enough OxyContin to kill anyone else, anyone who hasn’t spent the past sixteen years building up a tolerance. He knows it like he knows his first time was when he was seventeen, and it with a dealer who made him a deal when he ran out of money for the first time; he knows it even if he really doesn’t remember it. He knows it like he knows Ben’s about to leave.   
“Yeah, okay,” he exhales. He doesn’t open his eyes.   
“Are you lying?”  
“Obviously I’m lying, how would you not-“  
“Then I’m gonna go.”  
“I can just…” Klaus opens his eyes. Ben’s gone. “... conjure you again.” Obviously he’s lying. He hasn’t been able to conjure anyone. Not even Dave. Especially not Dave.   
He climbs into bed and brings his knees up to his chest, alone for the first time since he was sixteen, unless he counts all the times he’s been so out of it he can’t even make Ben’s ghost stick around. And things feel bad. Things feel like he’s going to die, probably, or it’s going to start raining and it’s not going to stop until every room Klaus has ever been in is completely flooded.   
Ben died on a mission. The whole morning he had been saying that he shouldn’t go, that something felt wrong, and the whole morning Luther had just glared every time he brought it up. He was leaning on Klaus for support when they walked in through the back door of the museum. It was always a museum, and there was always something more valuable than the thing they were saving that got damaged in the process. Isn’t that a perfect metaphor, Klaus thinks, but suddenly he realizes he has no reason to say it out loud.   
Luther sent Ben after two of the thieves and he went staggering down the hall after them. Two minutes later he’d come running back, into the aftermath of the main fight, cleaner than usual. He and Klaus had sat in the gift shop and talked. They were good at talking to each other, at that point; they could go at it for hours and both know that something was wrong with the other person and something was wrong with themselves and never bring up either thing. And Luther had come in, asking where Ben was, and Klaus said that it was a pretty stupid question even for him, until he went to put his arm around Ben’s shoulders and his arm went straight through.   
He didn’t talk for two weeks after that. Sure, the body was bad, sometimes when he closes his eyes he still sees it, but that wasn’t the thing that kept him quiet. It was the idea that things could seem so normal- or, as normal as they could be- that reality could proceed the way it always had, but with a change so fundamental that it could break up a whole family and send people to wrestling gyms and Hollywood and music conservatories and rehab.   
Klaus’ room is too cold, all of a sudden. He wonders if it’s a ghost he can’t see. He wonders if he’ll ever be able to talk again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lemme know if u want me to drop my Klaus playlists I have a regular one, one for him and Dave, and one just for the mausoleum


End file.
